Re: [Gnash-dev] Contributing to gnash

From:

Sandro Santilli

Subject:

Re: [Gnash-dev] Contributing to gnash

Date:

Fri, 16 Dec 2011 08:23:48 +0100

User-agent:

Mutt/1.5.20 (2009-06-14)

On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 10:31:49AM +0530, niraj kulkarni wrote:
> Hi,
> I would like to join gnash developers community and contribute to its
> development. So can you tell me some debugging guidelines as well as
> trivial tasks which will help me get started?
Hello Niraj, thank you for your interest in Gnash !
I'm not sure we ever wrote a general guideline to debugging SWF playback,
maybe your first contribution could be drafting a wiki page about that ?
http://wiki.gnashdev.org
There are two kind of bugs you may want to debug:
(1) compatibility bugs
(2) performance bugs
1. compatibility bugs
It starts with an application not doing what it is supposed to do and
from there the goal is finding _what_ exactly it should do and why it
isn't doing it :)
There's a whole category of SWF movies that won't run because they require
an AVM2 implementation which Gnash doesn't have. But there are also many
cases of SWF versions up to 7 which are _supposed_ to work and don't.
I'm sure many of these are on the bug tracker so you may want to start
with one of them and focus on it. Feel free to ask here if you find one
which you think you'd enjoy working on. If you don't find any, consider
stepping by an online game website and I'm sure you'll find one (as long
as it does NOT require AVM2 ( File->Properties would tell you)).
2. performance bugs
Playback takes up too much RAM or CPU. This is much harder to debug in that
attempts to improve performances may introduce compatibility issue unless
you've a very good knowledge of the codebase. In any case asking on the
mailing list helps you reducing the risk.
In both cases automated tests for compatibility are of the upmost importance
to avoid breaking something by trying to fix something else. There is some
information about how our testsuite work in the gnash manual.
More informations about testing: http://wiki.gnashdev.org/Testing/QA
--strk;
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